Autonomous vehicles can improve the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. Autonomous automobiles, for example, may use microprocessors and sensors to make routing and maneuvering decisions. As a result, in many cases these vehicles can react more quickly and accurately to events and changing conditions than a human driver. Thus, autonomous vehicles can travel closer together and at higher speeds, which may provide benefits such as reducing congestion.
Unlike human drivers, autonomous vehicles may not give many of the visual or auditory cues that passengers are accustomed to being provided with while traveling in a vehicle. For example, a human driver may tell their passengers they are going to take a different route due to traffic caused by a car wreck ahead. Additionally, human drivers provide various physical cues as to routing and maneuvering decisions, such as changing the angle of their gaze when turning, or moving their arms to begin to rotate the steering wheel for a turn.
While autonomous vehicles continue to become more prevalent, they have yet to become commonplace. Many people have not experienced travel in an autonomous vehicle and do not trust or understand decisions made by autonomous vehicles, especially in the absence of visual or auditory cues for routing and maneuvering decisions with which human passengers are accustomed. The lack of trust and comfortability that many human passengers have for autonomous vehicles results in reluctance by many humans to adopt autonomous vehicle transportation.